Thursday, November 6, 2008

7 comments:

Humor needs an element of truth in order to be funny. This wasn't a well done attempt at humor, but it failed miserably.

They should have done a skit on what the haters will do now that Obama has won. Jumping out of windows, getting passports to move, moving to Alaska, playing reruns of McCain ads, wondering around empty lots where Palin had her hate rallies, even looking wistfully at photos of pitbulls in lipstick... but any of that would have been too close to their own reality for them to deal with.

Some Obamaites cannot see the humour in the piece, because it gets a bit too close to exposing the truth about Obama and his supporters.

One being, that "movements" are not created, and cannot be sustained, by politicians.

Another is that Obama is a politician. Politicians are not leaders.

Another is that Obama was marketed to us with empty rhetoric. What change? Yes we can what?

A lot of Obama supporters don't want to look at the emptiness that is the politician, and how they have projected their vision of what they want him to be on to him, instead of looking at his political actions:

--voted for immunity for the telecoms,

--always voted to give Bush the money he asked for to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,

--he supports the death penalty, has said that he will not pull out of Iraq; that he will escalate the war in Afghanistan

and a host of other non-progressive, non-liberal actions that, if one were to stop and think a bit, show him to not be the man many of those young, idealistic whites [in the video] believe him to be.

Macon, I thought about this video a couple days later, and decided maybe the timing of seeing it was bad, ie, on the coattails of all the animosity right up to Election Day. Were it not for that, I may have found it funny.

So I waited a week and showed it to my son. He hardly ever reads or watches the news, so missed out on a lot of the hate that went on. He thought it was funny and could easily picture white families being able to relate to it. I think he's right.

Thanks for coming back to explain that, Kit. I'm glad to hear your son found it funny. Your reaction (or maybe, reactions?) seem to indicate that the humor here depends a lot on one's perspective. I see it as a satire on some Obama supporters, s white or mostly white subset of supporters who got all wrapped up in Obama's high-flown rhetoric and charisma, without attending to the detailed substance he and his campaign also offered. I also related to the video personally, in a different way, just in terms of being completely drained like that at the end of such a tense, emotional, exhilarating, joyous, and so on week.